


I’ll love the world like I should

by rayfelle



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 22:58:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3505934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rayfelle/pseuds/rayfelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both Eren and the sea stretch out as far as eyes could see and blend with the horizon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I’ll love the world like I should

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Aija for betaing for me again. And the long review. You're the best.

He breathes in the scent of the salt that clings to the air around him. Ice water laps around his ankles and the sun burns cold on his skin. It felt like he was dying and being born anew at the same time – this moment of time quiet and eats away at the problems, corrodes away his dreams and hopes.  

Monsters didn’t live in closets and under the bed for Eren. They lived in the expectations others had for him, they were born from the stress of never making it in time and pouring his thoughts into papers and tests and the future he didn’t even chose for himself. There were so many roads ahead of him. He saw so many dreams right in the reach of his hand but could never gather the courage sleeping at the bottom of his soul to work for them. His mother’s words were law and chains binding him to the cold concrete that just sunk further down the black hole of his sanity.

But now he was free. He was free to breathe in the crisp winter air until his lungs broke open and bled warm blood down his stomach and legs.

He opens his eyes and reaches out with fingertips bruised raw towards the horizon. That’s where the days were brighter and grass softer, or so he was told in the old movies about a better day to come. There was no stress there. No duties to fulfill for the sake of family and no need to cry himself to sleep and remind over and over again that boys didn’t get depressed and scared of the unknown.

Boys were strong. Boys didn’t show weakness. Boys were--- Boys this and boys that, Eren never understood why boys couldn’t just drop down on their knees in the middle of a crowd and cry out the insecurities and pressure that pushed on them like lead. Sometimes he wasn’t a boy and then he allowed himself to pretend even for a day that there was nothing wrong with him, nothing out there to cut off the pair of wings growing from right under his shoulders.

The water is still ice and his feet are numb from the cold, the pain so real and different from the one he had been feeling until now. It feels better, somehow, this kind of suffering. It makes him feel alive and like he mattered, it makes him become one with the endless blue by his feet. Both Eren and the sea stretch out as far as eyes could see and blend with the horizon, rage on with black fangs when the winds pick up and the water turns a dirty black and destroys everything in its path.

One day, _one day_ he will become one with the ocean as well.

But now this is enough. Here in this country without a name and with beaches the shade of rusty gold this is enough. This is freeing enough, the foreign water, rain and wind strips Eren naked and leaves him bare in front of the opened gates towards the kind of acceptance he had wished for most.

“You’re beautiful.” Levi speaks from where he stands, bare feet buried in the cold sand and half of his face buried in the dark blue scarf Eren knows too well. “Look like a siren. Wild.” The man then kicks up white dust of sand and seashells, looks through it at Eren and speaks more with his eyes than he did with his mouth. Levi was always like that. Quiet with words and loud with his eyes, always there to prove that contradictions are beautiful and broken things look better covered in glue than put perfectly back together.

Eren turns around so that he’s facing the other, his feet barely moving the ice that he stood in and tries to stay standing up straight. He feels high, as if he hasn’t eaten anything for days and weeks before getting as drunk as he possibly could. The world is spinning, colored grey and see-through with the quiet promise of a storm to come and snow to cover anything living with its dead body. He looks at Levi when the world stills for half a second and tries to come up with sounds. With words, even. It’s hard and there is sandpaper scraping along the inside of his throat and lower still. Feels like he’s bleeding to death on the inside, but in the good way.

They look at each other. With blue lips and pale skin Eren looks like something out of myths that are told about eternal creatures and forbidden curses in the dark of the night and covered in candlelight. “I’m not.” He breathes out white steam, feels his skin crawl from how sharp his own voice is. It’s so cold. _Freezing_. He’s naked, almost, standing on the separation between the living and the dead. Sea is the grave, always the grave and never the ark to salvation.

Nothing is said then. Eren stands still and lets the water crawl up his naked legs and past what little he is wearing. Lets it take over his sensations and body alike. He is the living dead and he is one with the one thing that would never disappear in dust and rubble of mistakes and promises broken.

But even someone as broken and full of holes and scotch-taped cracks wants to feel the warmth of Levi’s body against his skin. Be it while Eren is a boy, be it when he is a girl. Or maybe neither and just a simple and lost human being stumbling along the road he is tied to. Maybe if he were to finally decide on just one kind of _self_ it would be easier to do. Lock away the unusual and different, pretend to be normal and ignore the soul that was tearing itself in small paper pieces over how wrong it feels to lie even to his own self.

Mistakes of the youth. Phase of rebellion. As if. As if it is that simple and black and white.

“You are. Like the sea, you know.” Levi burrows deeper into his jacket and looks both at Eren and the sea at the same time. To him they are one and the same, twins separated at birth and now finally meeting for the first time. Is there anything else to wish for than to see someone he cares for so deeply to finally feel like his place in the world mattered just as much as everyone else’s? Be it clad in a dress reflecting the cosmos or be it wrapped in jeans tight and sweaters too large for his shoulders – Levi only cares about Eren’s smile and the sea inside of the other moving with the currents and paths it had carved for itself.

And so they are here – in the middle of nowhere, so far away from those who judged and those who put their dreams in a neat pile on top of Eren’s back and kicked him to move faster, carry more. Running away was childish and didn’t mend the wounds made and left behind, but who cared about that. Levi is here only for Eren. There is nothing else to gain than to see the godly being before him turn inside out and become what he truly is meant to be.

Eren finally moves, splashes himself with the sea and then walks out of the land of dead. “Only because of you.” He wraps himself around the man and breathes in the salty air now mixed with warmth and distant smell of black tea. How has he earned the right to call this man his, no matter what they are. More than friends and lovers, different from anything else that had been given a name and status. “You kidnapped me and saved me. Took me here and let me attempt…” He cannot finish.

Maybe if the night were to fall right now they would both walk across the ice and deeper inside the horizon, disappear into nothingness and leave behind questions without answers. But maybe they were meant to do it later in their life when everything else was done and tried.

“Want to stay here?” Levi asks instead, both hands still in the pockets of his jacket and eyes melting volcanoes inside of Eren’s heart. “Your eyes are just like diamonds.” If Eren was everything cold then Levi is the heat that created and burned everything it touched. They self-destruct in order to create and become one. It was a strange dance of starved cravings and controlled romance.

“No, let’s go. I’m okay now.” Eren parts with the sea without leaving a good bye. His feet still numb and in pain, fingers still raw and salt biting into their tips, melting the old pain with a new one.

This is the pain of being alive and being different, he guesses. It is the kind of pain that allowes him to cry no matter what he is. It is the kind of pain that makes him finally shout out the decisions and dreams Eren has kept locked away for the sake of appeasing everyone else but himself. No more slaving under the empty praises of his mother and no more hiding away when he wasn’t a boy for a day. In this country without a name there are no rules to follow. Only those that he has made.

Levi’s hands are as warm as they had been the first time the man had called out and said that the skirt suited Eren. The man is still the same young child from years ago that had promised to someday free Eren from the mortal body of his and let him see the world for what it was  - their playground and Barbie house to remodel anew each day. It is the only thing Eren has seen as true and has kept close and protected throughout the silent crying in his dorm and the unsaid pleas about what he wanted to study.

“Thank you.” He laughs out and kissed Levi’s cheek. He doesn’t want to stay alone anymore. Doesn’t want to leave without Levi, be it this beach or be it something more. Something has missingin Eren without Levi, something that had hurt for so long it seemed easier to just cut that part out and live with a hole in the middle of his chest.

Fingers trace along his blue lips, over the stains of the tears he has cried and finally stop when they have made it seem like Eren hasn’t cried at all. No words just the change in the dark grey that was Levi’s eyes and then the dark blue of the scarf and ocean storm is looking back at Eren, setting him on fire and reminding that there was no need for something to be said. What they have is more than that.

When they kiss it feels like new worlds are born and lightning strikes through Eren’s body. He feels nothing but the kind of lightlessness that comes from an overdose of feelings too true and as sweet as the first taste of cotton candy .His fingers clutch onto Levi’s scarf and the man’s fire, he tries to take more of everything inside of him and keep it there for as long as possible. The greedy little thing that he was. The selfish thing that he was. But Levi keeps on giving and showing Eren more, he keeps on proving that there is still something worth running to until the blisters brake and muscles give out.

Eren pulls back first and smiles. “I’ll be good.” He whispers a spell between them and closes his eyes to not see the frail gold surrounding the two of them. “I’ll love it. I’ll love the world like I should now. I’ll love myself.”

He leaves the sea and the cold. Only to keep it inside of himself from now on.


End file.
